The present application relates generally to the field of search marketing services and, more particularly, to methods and systems for providing search marketing services such as pay-per-call services for connecting consumers and merchants.
Pay-per-call is an advertising scheme used by websites, search engines, advertising networks, and the like, for providing marketing services. Merchants subscribe to service providers for the search marketing services. The merchants provide information about their businesses and one or more search terms to the service providers to enable searching through a service provider's search interfaces. Examples of service providers include, but are not limited to, search engines, telecom service providers, vertical search websites, newspapers online websites, and the like. The service providers may provide the search marketing services using, e.g., Internet, existing telecommunication networks, intranets, local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN), wide area networks (WAN), and the like.
Existing solutions for providing search marketing services include pay-per-call solutions, click-to-call solutions, and pay-per-click solutions. The pay-per-call solutions involve signing up merchants and assigning toll-free or local tracking phone numbers corresponding to the pre-existing telephone numbers of the merchants, for enabling communication between a consumer and the merchants. In particular, each search service provider advertising business of the merchant may provide a different toll free or local tracking number corresponding to the pre-existing telephone number associated with the merchant's business. This enables service providers to track and charge the merchant for the communication between the consumer and the merchant.
The click-to-call solutions include Personal Computer (PC)-based click to call and Mobile-based click-to-call solutions. The PC-based click-to-call solutions allow a consumer to provide a callback number, and a service provider such as, e.g., Google, connects the consumer and the selected merchant without typically disclosing the identity of the consumer. The click-to-call solutions may also allow the consumer to click on an icon on the search results page to call the merchant by downloading a Java plug-in and allowing the consumer to click an icon with the search results and call the merchant directly using Instant Messaging. The Mobile-based click-to-call solutions include enabling searching using a mobile phone. A communication between the consumer and the merchants may be established by clicking on an icon displayed in the search results on the mobile phone.
The toll free or local tracking numbers generally have to be used within a predefined time period, e.g., 24 hours, after which the number becomes invalid and consumers may get connected to a completely different merchant who may have been assigned same virtual toll free number. The pre-existing telephone number associated with the merchant is generally not displayed in the search results to enable tracking of the communication between the consumers and the merchants for billing purposes.